Hag stones are easy to miss. Half-buried along riverbanks or tucked between pebbles on the shore, they can appear ordinary at first glance. But once you notice a hole worn clean through its centre, smoothed by water and time, you know you’ve found something special.
This month we’re neck-deep in folklore, and in folklore nothing creates a hole without reason.
Hag stones (also known as witch stones) have long been regarded as protective objects. Throughout the ages they’ve been hung on doors, tied above beds, fastened to stables and cradles, and carried in pockets. Not because they’re beautiful (though some most certainly are), but because they’re deemed useful.
And when I say useful, I mean in a magical sense.
Albeit a magic that’s defensive and suspicious by nature.
According to folklore, to look through the hole of a hag stone is a way of seeing past the surface and into the unknown. Though not without risk. Folk warnings cautioned against looking too long because whatever you see, it sees you back.
Hag stones slip fittingly into the realm of buried secrets. They’re formed slowly and invisibly. Water wears away stone, grain by grain, until something unexpected opens at the centre. There’s no drama or violence about it, just persistence. Time doing what time always does, whether we notice or not.
And secrets work much the same way.
Families bury things with good intentions. Whether to protect, preserve or keep the peace. Over years, generations even, those buried truths are worn thin by repetition, omission and quiet pressure. Eventually, a gap appears, forming a hole straight through the stories we’ve been told.
You can’t rush hag stones or force them into being. They endure a long process and come out altered, but intact.
In superstition, they were regarded particularly effective against whatever slipped through the threshold. Witches, spirits and ill-intentioned visitors. Hung on a cord, they acted as anchors, pinning reality in place when boundaries grew thin.
Many hag stones are discovered after storms or floods. They follow moments of upheaval and disturbance when buried things surface unexpectedly.
To find one feels like being chosen.
They don’t promise safety, but instead awareness. They remind us that what’s buried is rarely gone. Time alters secrets but doesn’t erase them. And sometimes, protection isn’t about banishing danger, but about learning where the holes are in the story.
If you find a hag stone, consider where it came from. What wore it open. What surfaced alongside it. And ask yourself what it is that you might like to see beyond the surface.
Just don’t linger too long with your eye pressed to the centre.
Some truths, once glimpsed, are difficult to unsee.
R. H. DIXON 